Month: August 2012

Finally, some news on the publishing front. This Friday will the the publication of my first Kindle Single!

Tea Party Fairy Tales will be available exclusively in electronic form from Amazon, 48 pages of trenchant social analysis and juvenile humor for the low, low price of $1.99.

For those interested, the genesis of the book is as follows: Last year, in response to what I saw as screaming, spittle-flecked hostility on the part of the Tea Party conservatives, I was noodling around with more strange fairy tales. (Of course, there are Tea Party Republicans out there, but also many folks who think Republicans are just as complicit as Democrats, and equally worthy of tar and feathers, in a revival of a classic American artisan tradition.) First I played with Red Riding Hood a bit, and was happy with the results. Then I tried a few others, some of which worked, others not. I then tried some of Aesop’s Fables, which earlier had not withstood the PC treatment very well, but here lent themselves nicely to pithy, aggressive morals advising the reader to wise up or get eaten.

The humor wasn’t the long-winded, apologetic kind that propelled Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. “Kindness-impaired” and “outside the dominant beauty paradigm” wouldn’t work for this, and frankly I’m tapped out on that anyway. What this topic needed was a combination of paranoia, unshakeable faith in everything American, a soupcon of conspiracy, and lots of anger. I hope I’ve found the humor in Tea Bagger extremism (my editor and reading buddies say I did) just like I did for the PC crowd. What’s sauce for the goose is propa for the ganda.

A problem arose, however: it became clear early that I could not make this into a book as long as PCBS. Either I exhausted the material early, or it exhausted me, but the manuscript came out at around 14,000 words. (God-given, eternal truths don’t need a lot of explanation. They just need to be followed.) But that’s the beauty of Kindle Singles, and electronic publishing in general. A book can be as long as it needs to be, not a word more or less. So the new book treats topics without beating them into the ground, and the format allows me to use a light, surgical touch for a topic that could easily get out of hand.

Couple that with the marketing reach of Amazon, and I couldn’t be happier to publish with them. I really dig the whole e-publishing thing. I think it’s going to revive the age of pamphleteering and short fiction, and maybe already has. Rex Koko, Private Clown is finding its audience with it, I hope the same happens with Tea Party Fairy Tales.

To get your copy, click on the link below. I hope you all will like it.